This is an opinion column.
Once upon a time an old sports writer was asked when a player should know it’s time to get out of the game.
“Before the coach does,” he said.
Kind of makes you think of a presidential race. But let’s come back to that.
I think that sports writer was Alabama legend Clyde Bolton, though it’s fuzzy in my mind. Sounds like him. He was the guy who, when asked if he’d quit his job if he won the lottery, replied “No, I’d just stop coming to the office.”
You could always count on newsrooms and cops and coroners for jokes. See enough tragedy, you learn to lean into comedy.
Like old Jefferson County Chief Deputy Randy Christian once said about a naked guy caught sneaking into the Birmingham Country Club after a Fourth of July fireworks show: “I’d say that’s pretty amazing. I can’t get into Birmingham Country Club fully clothed.”
I guess Mark Twain was right when he supposedly said: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
Despite what the transcripts say.
Is it just me, or does it feel like a lot of us have forgotten how to laugh? People are too nervous or cautious or mad to even try to joke these days. Too serious to snicker. And that’s the scariest thought in a scary world.
I know it’s hard out there. Two feeble old men – sanded smooth and dyed in a vain attempt to look alive – vie to lead a free world that wouldn’t trust either one to drive to the grocery store on their own.
Institutions fall like confidence in the courts, artificial intelligence makes us feel naturally stupid, politics turns brother against sister, and people split into packs because of race or region or religion or disagreement on whether to despair over the future or ignore our problems as if they were terms and conditions.
There’s inflation and climate change and too much gunfire. Alabamians, overall, are poorer, less healthy and more stressed than most, and people tend to blame those who have the least power and the least to do with it.
Things are tough. They are. Which, by the logic I try to live by, would mean we need more wit and less snit. We need to laugh ourselves lively again. I mean come on, people found humor during World War II, and the Civil War, and the Nickelback era. Holocaust survivors have said humor was a primary defense mechanism to get them through. If people could laugh in the face of Auschwitz, we ought to be able to chuckle today.
Even at ourselves. I mean, we the people of Alabama elected a football coach from Florida to the U.S. Senate. Who are the butts of that joke?
But it does seem more difficult to joke about the world than it used to be. Maybe because humor, at its essence, tends to live on the misfortune of somebody else, and we think more about the consequences of that these days. I think we’re more sensitive to the feelings of others – which is a good thing – and we worry more about what other people think, which is often not. We often take ourselves too seriously.
But if that’s the case, the joke’s on us.
Because fears and phobias have no defense against humor. And neither do despots, dictators or a lot of our most depressing thoughts.
A joke in the face of trouble does not require you to ignore the trouble. And laughter, as one of those old funny guys said, is humanity’s only real weapon.
Or in words attributed to Will Rogers – who made people laugh even through the Great Depression – “an onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.”
Don’t be a vegetable.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.